Anthropologists
are long working on different aspects of policy. They have often witnessed the
impact of policies on human life and culture. However, only relatively recently
policy itself become an object and subject of anthropological enquiry.

Till 1990s
most anthropological engagement with policy making was of an ‘applied’ and
largely uncritical nature. The studies mostly were commissioned studies and
consultancy researches that worked around the question “How can anthropology
best serve policy makers in help solving policy problems?” (Cochrane, 1980;
Wilner, 1980).

The
assumption that anthropological knowledge is extremely helpful and relevant to
policy makers and that anthropological knowledge should harness to service the
needs of government (or industry/corporation/market) is quite an old notion.
Even in the 1940s and 1950s Evans Pritchard (1951) had sought to promote
applied anthropology as a kind of ‘managerial science of mankind’. In 1981
Raymond Firth along with other key figures of British Anthropology were
advancing narrow definition of anthropology in terms of its perceived value for
government or as now defined in terms of its relevance to the end-users.

However, it
is important to note that in terms of its methodology and focus, the
anthropology of policy is very different from applied anthropology. The
difference comes from the question of utility and relevance that raises a wider
debate over what exactly anthropologists seek to achieve by applying their
knowledge or engaging with policy makers. Is it dialogue, influence over policy
professionals, or a way for academics to shape the formation or implementation
of public policy? Or is the goal to unpack policy as a cultural category and to
analyse its uses in order to shed light on structures and processes that shape
society? It is important to note Gregory Feldman (2007) should anthropology
“follow the policy gaze, or seek to critique it”? Or can it do both? In recent
years, anthropologists have increasingly shifted towards the latter position,
i.e., developing analytical approaches that seek to problematise policy both as
a concept or idea force and as a set
of related practices (Shore and Wright 1997, Wedel et al. 2005). This is one of
the areas which distinguishes anthropology of policy from applied anthropology.
It also differentiates anthropology of policy from policy studies. The point of
departure is that whereas most of the scholars see policy as something given
and do not question its meaning or ontological status as a category, in
anthropology of policy scholars see policy as itself a curious and problematic
social and cultural construct that needs to unpacked and contextualised if its
meanings are to be understood.

Anthropology of
policy originates from the recognition that policy has become an increasingly
central and dominant organising principle of contemporary society, perhaps even
of modernity itself (Shore and Wright 1997). This is extremely relevant because
of the fact that there are extremely complex ways in which policy as a concept
work. Virtually every aspect of human life is now shaped by policies, whether
these emanate from governments, public institutions or non-governmental
organisations (NGO) and private sector bodies. Policies on international
relations, trade, national security and public health to policies on building
regulations, employment relations, taxation, education, citizenship rights and
sexual conducts we are circled by regulatory policies that shapes us in more
ways than we are aware about. Shore and Wright (1997) in their Anthropology of Policy: Critical
Perspectives on Governance and Power put forward three arguments.

First policies are
inherently anthropological phenomena and should be conceptualised as discursive
formations through which larger-scale processes of social and historical change
can be mapped. As they also noted, policies often occupy the same role as myth
in traditional societies, providing ‘charters for action’, guide to behaviour
and legimating narratives for leaders and would-be rulers.

Second, while policies can
be conceptualised as a type of narrative or performance they are also political
technologies that serve to create new categories of subjectivity, for example,
citizens, taxpayers, criminals, immigrants, or pensioners. Insofar as they
become internalised, policies also work as techniques of the self. As with most
forms of powers, policies tend to disguises its mechanism of operation either by
seeking to naturalise its arbitrariness or by concealing the particularism and
hidden interests that often underlie its formulation.

Third, argument entailed
the implications of a focus on policy for anthropological methods. If policies
are instruments of power, they also provide instruments for analysing the
operation of power.

Therefore, in
order to understand people’s life world it is important to have an
anthropological understanding of policies. With an anthropological study of
policy we can gain critical insight into the complex ways in which concepts,
institutions and actors (policy assemblages) interact in different sites either
to consolidate regimes of power/knowledge or to create new rationalities of
governance.

Furthermore with
anthropological notions it is possible to provide a necessary corrections to
rational choice models and unreflexive positivistic accounts that still
dominate the way that policy processes are typically conceptualised among
academics and policy professionals. More importantly policy provides anthropology
with a lens to analyse wider political processes and systems of government.

Most academic research on policy premised
on the idea of policy as a neat, hierarchical and seamless flow that follows a
patterned pathway, also known as policy cycle (Figure 1).

Figure 1 the conventional policy cycle

This policy
cycle model with its instrumental-rational assumptions is the received wisdom
and starting point for most textbooks and continues to shape the way policy is
taught in professional programmes.

The anthropology
of policy brings much-needed perspectives to the influential field of public
policy and the growing area of enquiry that falls under the broad heading of
"policy studies." The problem with much of the latter is that it
continues to operate within a positivistic paradigm that treats policy as a
reified entity and an unanalyzed given, seldom questioning the conceptual or
cultural bases of its own analytical assumptions. In other words, public policy
is often thought of as an "assembly line" or "con veyor
belt." But policy making and implementation hardly follow a linear process
with a predetermined outcome. On the contrary, policy processes often encounter
unforeseen variables, which are frequently combined in unforeseen ways and with
unforeseen consequences. For example, as Wedel (2001,8-9) found in her study of
Western assistance to eastern Europe, aid policies may appear more like a
series of "chemical reactions" that begin with the donor's policies
but are transformed by the agendas, interests, and interactions of the donor
and recipient representatives at each stage of implementation and interface.
Despite recent ethnographies illustrating the limitations of the rational
choice model in "policy studies," anthropologists have yet to put
forth a compelling, coherent critique of that model.

However in
recent period spurred by dissatisfaction with the conventional positivistic
approach which represents policy analysis as a kind of scientific endeavour, a
number of scholars within political science and international relations have
sought to develop alternative perspectives drawing on ethnography and other
qualitative methods (Rhodes et al. 2007). In some instances, this ‘cultural
turn in policy studies has been influenced by anthropology, particularly the
work of Geertz, most notably in the development of Interpretative Policy
Analysis (Yanow 1996, 2000). Others drawing on continental European philosophy
have turned to linguistics, discourse analysis and rhetoric as a way of
rethinking policy analysis (Fischer and Forester 1993, Fiscger 2003; Goittweis
2006; Peters and Pierre 2006; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006). These developments open up an important space
for for dialogue between anthropology and more qualitatively oriented policy
studies (ayanow 2011).

Anthropological
approaches emphasise the contingency, fluidity and messiness of policy
processes. They highlight that policies are not confined to texts; nor are they
simply constraining, instrumental-rational rational forces imposedfrom above by some authoritative entity,
Rather policy is both productive and performative, a complex, creative process
that produces new kinds of relationships, new spaces for exchange, and new
kinds of subjectivity. But the process by which policies develop is often
ambiguous and contested. What is anthropologically interesting about a
particular policy is its genealogy and the contestations and negotiations
involved in its formation. Anthropological accounts are also sensitive to the
way people experience, interpret and engage with these policy processes and to
what policies mean in different contexts. In Clifford Geertz’s term (1973) we
take the analysis of policy to be ‘not an experimental science in search of a
law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning.’ However, analysis of any
policy requires more than thick descriptions; we also need to examine the
contexts in which policies are embedded, the work they perform and their
preconditions and gelealogies and their effects. Understanding why certain
policies succeed or fail also entails knowing something about the way they are
experienced and interpreted by people whose lives they effect.

Anthropologists
of American, British, and other traditions have long recognized the
intertwining of anthropological topics with policy. In the United States, for example,
early debates among Franz Boas and other prominent anthropologists of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries over evolutionary theory went to the
core of public policies dealing with race and gender (Stocking 1968; Smedley 1993).
At issue was whether "race" and "gender" are biological or
social and whether they are fixed or changing. Some anthropologists, such as
Louis Henry Morgan and Edward Tylor, assumed in their comparative studies of
kinship and other institutions that human cultures (often corresponding with
nineteenth century Western notions of "biological races") developed
through a series of evolutionary stages, from "savagery" to
"civilization." Other scholars, such as Boas, challenged these
assumptions. For example, Boas s studies of immigrants, conducted at the behest
of the United States Immigration Commission, demonstrated that "race"
is a changing, social construct and that physical differences between
"races" are variable and depend on context.

Today, many
anthropologists study contemporary global processes and how global,
transnational entities interact with states, nations, and local groups. There are
those who study militarism and national security policies in the United States (Lutz
2002, 2005), Europe (Feldman 2003), Latin America (Gill 2004), and the Middle
East (Bornstein 2001). Others study donor politics, foreign and domestic aid
(Wedel 2001), research funding (Brenneis 1999), and tensions between anthropologists
and human rights lawyers and journalists (Merry 2003).

Nader (1974,1980)
appealed to the discipline to "study up"?that is, to analyze powerful
institutions and elites of complex societies?as an antidote to the traditional
focus on poor, colonized, and marginalized peoples. "A reinvented
anthropology," Nader wrote, "should study powerful institutions and
bureaucratic organizations in the United States, for such institutions and
their network systems affect our lives and also affect the lives of people that
anthropologists have traditionally studied all around the world"
(1974,292-93). Wolf (1974,261) similarly urged anthropologists to "spell
out the processes of power which created the present-day cultural systems and
the linkages between them." Other notable works heeding these calls
include Marcus's (1992) study of dynastic-business families in
late-twentieth-century America and Gusterson's (1996,1999) study of nuclear
engineers in a weapons lab oratory at the end of the cold war. There are also
those, like Marietta Baba (2000, 38-39), who argue anthropologists must begin
studying professional institutions and organizations, such as medical, legal,
industrial, and educational ones, which are "rapidly becoming the most
powerful forces shaping the human condition now and the future.

While the
"powerful institutions" about which Nader wrote are even more so today,
anthropologists studying globalization and connected subjects have tended to
focus on how global processes affect local communities. Appadurai's (1996) important
treatment of globalization from the angle of actors who are profoundly affected
by global processes is a case in point. Relatively little anthropological work has
been done to explore how social organization and networks organize transnational
players and policy processes, global elites, decision makers, and those who influence
decisions. Two recent exceptions, however, are Catherine Lutz's (2005) and
Lesley Gill's (2004) research on militarism. Lutz is currently conducting ethnographic
research into the role of the U.S. military in the Asia-Pacific region and
resulting responses to U.S. military bases by local and transnationally linked social
movements. Her study includes interviews about military bases with local activists,
base neighbors, and U.S. military and diplomatic personnel. Similarly, Gill's
study of the School of Americas (SOA) included interviews of U.S. Army officers
and the Latin Americanists who trained at the school, anti-SOA activists, and Andean
coca-growing peasants who were often targeted by security forces during the
"War on Drugs."

The starting
point of an anthropological approach to public policy is to examine the
assumptions and framing of policy debates. Policies arise out of particular
contexts and in many ways "encapsulate the entire history and culture of
the society that generated them," as Shore and Wright (1997, 7) expressed
it. While policies may be clothed in neutral language? their ostensible purpose
merely to promote efficiency or effectiveness? they are fundamentally
political. In fact, "a key feature of modern power, "Shore and Wright
contended, is the "masking of the political under the cloak of neutrality"
(pp. 8-9). The anthropology of policy takes public policy itself as an object
of analysis, rather than as the unquestioned premise of a research agenda.
Anthropology is well suited to explore the cultural and philosophical
underpinnings of policy? its enabling discourses, mobilizing metaphors, and
underlying ideologies and uses. Anthropologists can explain how
taken-for-granted assumptions channel policy debates in certain directions,
inform the dominant ways policy problems are identified, enable particular
classifications of target groups, and legitimize certain policy solutions while
marginalizing others.

Anthropology of
policy is not simply concerned with representing local, indigenous, or
marginalized "cultures" to policy makers, government agencies, or concerned
NGOs. Its focus instead is simultaneously wider and narrower: wider insofar as
its aim is to explore how the state (or to be more exact, those policy makers
and professionals who are authorized to act in the state's name) relates to
local populations; and narrower to the extent that its ethnographic focus tends
to privilege the goal of understanding how state policies and government
processes are experienced and interpreted by people at the local level, keeping
in mind that anthropologists are recasting the "local" or the
"community" to capture changing realities. Comaroff and Comaroff
(1999, 294), for example, stressed that" 'Local ity' is not everywhere,
nor for every purpose, the same thing; sometimes it is a family, sometimes a
town, a nation, sometimes a flow or a field, sometimes a continent or even the
world; often it lies at the point of articulation among two or more of these
things." An anthropology of policy, however, is equally interested in
understanding the cultures and worldviews of those policy professionals and
decision makers who seek to implement and maintain their particular vision of
the world through their policies and decisions. From an anthropological
perspective, what happens in the executive boardroom, the cabinet meeting, or
the shareholders' annual general meeting is no less important than that which
occurs at the level of the factory floor or locality. Thus, an anthropological
approach to the study of policy incorporates the full realm of processes and
relations involved in the production of policy: from the policy makers and
their strategic initiatives to the locals who invariably shape and mediate
policy while translating and implementing it into action.

Shore and Wright
(1997, 13) suggested, anthropologists are uniquely positioned "to
understand the workings of multiple, intersect ing and conflicting power
structures that are local but tied to non-local systems." An
anthropological approach attempts to uncover the constellations of actors, activities,
and influences that shape policy decisions and their implementation, effects,
and how they play out. Anthropology therefore gives particular emphasis to the
idea that the study of policy decisions and their implementation must be situated
in an empirical or ethnographic context: They cannot be adequately mapped using
variables whose values and correlations are prespecified by an abstract model.

Studying policy
requires rethinking an anthropological pillar?the discipline's traditional
concept of "the field"?as a single and (relatively) geographically bounded
place (Gupta and Ferguson 1997,37). Today, "the field" often consists
of loosely connected actors with varying degrees of institutional leverage
located in multiple "sites" that are not always even geographically
fixed. With the post-cold war world s increased delegation of authority by
states and international organizations to private organizations, companies, and
actors, the architects and agents of a policy may be elusive, varied, and
diffused. Policies are no longer formulated primarily by governments, but
additionally by a plethora of supranational entities, businesses, NGOs, private
actors, or some combination of these. Anthropology offers a social organizational
approach that illuminates the structures and processes that ground, order, and
give direction to policies. An ethnographer explores how individuals,
organizations, and institutions are interconnected and asks how policy
discourses help to sustain those connections even if the actors involved are
never in face-to-face (or even direct) contact. "Studying through" (Reinhold
1994, 477-79; Shore and Wright 1997), the process of following the source of a policy?
its discourses, prescriptions, and programs? through to those affected by the
policies does just that. For example, Shore and Wright (1999,2000) have used
this approach to examine the cultural consequences and implications of British
government reforms of higher education since the 1980s. Similarly, Wedel (2001)
has studied "through" the interactions of donors and recipients to
explore the social organization linking the overlapping arenas of activity
navigated by actors.

Social network
analysis, which unites both theory and method, can help illuminate sites of
articulation and interaction and thereby provide a snapshot of the workings of
transnational policy processes. Network analysis, which focuses on social
relations rather than the characteristics of actors, is powerful not only as a method
but also as "an orienting idea," as Scott (1991, 37) proposed. By
linking actors, network analysis can show how the local or regional level is
connected with the national level or the local, regional, or national level
with the international. Employing network analysis, an ethnographer can examine
relationships between individuals, groups, and organizations and the changing,
overlapping, and multiple roles that actors within them may play. Social
analysts have linked network structures to collective processes. Dezalay and
Garth (2002, 10), for example, showed that "tracing the careers of
particular individuals makes it obvious ... that the world of foundations and
that of human rights NGOs have always been very closely related; how through
concrete networks and careers the World Bank inter acts with local situations;
and how corporate law firms or advocacy organizations modeled on those in the
United States are brought to new terrains." Such analysis can serve as a
persuasive basis for explaining policy decisions. Wedels (2004) social network
study of a core group of "neoconservatives," first published in The
Washington Post, highlighted a dozen or so long-connected players, a "flex
group," whose skill at maneuvering between government and private roles,
at relaxing both the government's rules of accountability and businesses' codes
of competition, and at conflating state and private interests, proved essential
to the group's influence on American public policy. The group's "flex
organizing" enabled it to play a pivotal role in shaping U.S. policy
toward the Middle East and taking the United States to war in Iraq. Network
analysis?and the social organizational framework that it implies?is a useful
way to conceptualize the mixes of "state" and "private," of
"macro" and "micro," of "local" or
"national" and "global," of "top down" versus
"bottom up," and of "centralized" versus
"decentralized" that today configure many transnational policy
processes. Anthropologists are thus well positioned to track the interactions
between public policy and private interests and the mixing of state, nongovernmental,
and business networks that is becoming increasingly prevalent around the globe.

Anthropology
takes as a given that much of its most useful information can only be obtained
through trusted "informants." The "extended case method"
(Van Velsen 1967, 145), in which the ethnographer follows interconnected actors
around a particular series of events, lends itself to the study of ongoing
policy processes. The actors' responses to the same questions (regarding, for
example, their own and others' activities, perspectives, and networks) are then
compared and assessed over time. Although actors involved in a particular
"case" sometimes are located in different sites, they always are
connected by the policy process and/or by actual social networks. However, in
as many sites as possible, anthropologists strive to conduct participant
observation or at least some long-term association with actors in their own territories
(Agar 1996, 58). When this is impossible or impractical, however, they employ
alternative methods. In "studying up," conducting interviews is often
the only means of gathering firsthand information and gaining entre to
difficult-to access "fields," such as individuals in powerful
institutions. For example, it was only because the U.S. Army's School of
Americas suffered from a moment of public vulnerability after pressures from
human rights groups that Gill (2004) was providedan opportunity to interview
graduates of the school. When interviews are the primary source of information
from a particular site, cross-checking critical information and corroborating
key points with multiple sources is crucial (Wedel 2003). Anthropologists
employ additional methods as well. "Talking to and living with the members
of a community," Gupta and Ferguson (1997, 37) reported, "are increasingly
taking their place alongside reading newspapers, analyzing government
documents, observing the activities of governing elites, and tracking the internal
logic of transnational development agencies and corporations."

Declaration:

This article is prepared by taking materials from

Shore, Cris (2012) Anthropology and Public Policy. In Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology. Thousand Oaks: Sage

Janine R. Wedel, Cris Shore, Gregory Feldman, Stacy Lathrop (2005). Toward an Anthropology of Public Policy. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 600, pp. 30 - 51

Anne Francis Okongwu and Joan P. Mencher (2000). THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF PUBLIC POLICY:

Its Kaleidoscope

A cotraveler who seats endlessly on a chair that we tend to call world and moves through wonder places. Try not to move from the chair, transcending time. Try to unearth silences and capture through multiple lenses. Behind the corner of my eyes there are things I can not see... things I do not understand...
So here I am with words to share and become a cotraveler from my being. Yes, so many things to express but not genuinely gifted with skills.